Hayek on Mill: The Mill-Taylor Friendship and Related Writings

Hayek on Mill: The Mill-Taylor Friendship and Related Writings

Hayek on Mill: The Mill-Taylor Friendship and Related Writings

Hayek on Mill: The Mill-Taylor Friendship and Related Writings

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Overview

Best known for reviving the tradition of classical liberalism, F. A. Hayek was also a prominent scholar of the philosopher John Stuart Mill. One of his greatest undertakings was a collection of Mill’s extensive correspondence with his longstanding friend and later companion and wife, Harriet Taylor-Mill. Hayek first published the Mill-Taylor correspondence in 1951, and his edition soon became required reading for any study of the nineteenth-century foundations of liberalism.
           
This latest addition to the University of Chicago Press’s Collected Works of F. A. Hayek series showcases the fascinating intersections between two of the most prominent thinkers from two successive centuries. Hayek situates Mill within the complex social and intellectual milieu of nineteenth-century Europe—as well as within twentieth-century debates on socialism and planning—and uncovers the influence of Taylor-Mill on Mill’s political economy. The volume features the Mill-Taylor correspondence and brings together for the first time Hayek’s related writings, which were widely credited with beginning a new era of Mill scholarship.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780226106427
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 12/22/2022
Series: The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek , #16
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 424
Sales rank: 861,918
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

F. A. Hayek (1899–1992), recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 and cowinner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, was a pioneer in monetary theory and a leading proponent of classical liberalism in the twentieth century. Sandra J. Peart is dean and professor of leadership studies at the University of Richmond, where she also codirects the Summer Institute for the History of Economic Thought.

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Hayek on Mill

The Mill-Taylor Friendship and Related Writings


By F. A. Hayek, Sandra J. Peart

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2015 The Estate of F. A. Hayek
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-10642-7



CHAPTER 1

Harriet Taylor and Her Circle

1830


John Stuart Mill probably met Harriet Taylor for the first time in the summer or early autumn of 1830 when she was still in her twenty-third year but already married for more than four years and the mother of two sons. The special register, kept at the time for the voluntary use of Dissenters at Dr. Williams' Library, records on 10 October 1807, the birth at No. 18, Beckford Row, Walworth, in the South of London, of Harriet, daughter of Thomas Hardy, 'surgeon and man-midwife'. Her granddaughter Mary Taylor states that the Hardys had for some centuries been lords of the manor of Birksgate, near Kirkburton, where Thomas Hardy lived in retirement for the last ten years or so of his life before he died in 1849. If this is more than an unfounded affectation of gentility he was probably a younger son who early went to London to take up a profession. He appears at any rate to have practised at Walworth for many years since at least 1803, and even earlier to have married the daughter of a citizen of Walworth; other members of the Hardy family also seem to have lived in London. Thomas Hardy's practice apparently was sufficiently lucrative to enable him to give his numerous children a fairly good education. Occasional glimpses of him which we get in the family letters do not show him as an altogether amiable character. The impression they leave is of a somewhat domineering and difficult person, and since at least in later life Harriet Taylor's relations to her parents were not too cordial, the tradition that it was an unhappy home which drove her into an early marriage is at least credible.

John Taylor, to whom she was married on 14 March 1826, only five months after her eighteenth birthday, was eleven years her senior. He was a junior partner of David Taylor & Sons, a firm of wholesale druggists or 'drysalters' that had been carrying on a prosperous business in the City for at least fifty years. The firm had long been established in Finsbury Square and the adjoining Cross Street, and had already been conducted there by John Taylor's grandfather, that 'fine specimen of the old Scotch puritan; stern, severe, and powerful, but very kind to children, on whom such men make a lasting impression', who, as Mill tells us, had lived in his childhood in the next house to James Mill's at Newington Green and had sometimes invited young John to play in his garden. At least three of the sons of this old man, David, George and John Taylor, succeeded him in the firm, and by the time his grandson, John the younger, married, 'uncle David' appears to have been the senior partner and to have remained in that position during his nephew's life.

What we know about John Taylor on the whole tends to support the description of him given in the Autobiography: 'a most upright, brave, honourable man, but without the intellectual or artistic tastes which would have made him a companion' for his wife. Carlyle's characterization of him as 'an innocent dull good man', though perhaps less fair, is probably also not quite wrong. But if John Taylor was above all a prosperous business man who enjoyed the good things of life, his interests extended beyond this limited sphere. He devoted a good deal of time to the management of the finances of the Unitarian congregation to which the Taylors as well as the Hardys belonged, and conducted the occasionally difficult negotiation with its strong-willed minister, William Johnson Fox. As a convinced radical he took an active interest in politics; there is also some evidence that on behalf of the Unitarians he concerned himself with the affairs of the new University of London. In 1836 we find him among the original members of the Reform Club, which suggests that he was regarded as one of the more important radical business men. He also seems to have made a special point of looking after the interests of the numerous political exiles from France and Italy who had arrived in London.

For the first five years after their marriage John Taylor and his wife lived in the City in a house at 4, Christopher Street, Finsbury Circus, in close vicinity both to the firm and W. J. Fox's new chapel at South Place. Their first son, Herbert, was born there on 24 September 1827, and a second son, Algernon, invariably called Haji, followed on 2 February 1830. The third and last child, Helen (usually called Lily), was born on 27 July 1831. One or two surviving letters exchanged between husband and wife during the first few years of their married life show Mrs. Taylor as a devoted young wife and happy mother. But there is no reason to doubt that a certain disparity of tastes made itself felt long before her friendship with Mill began.

The only description of Harriet Taylor's appearance at that time comes from W. J. Fox's daughter, who, if she really refers as she says to about 1831, would then have been a small girl of about seven. As it mentions Mrs. Taylor's age as about twenty-five, it probably dates from two or perhaps even more years later and is practically contemporaneous with the portrait reproduced opposite page 127 which it singularly well confirms:

[Mrs John] Taylor at this date, when she was, perhaps about five and twenty years of age, was possessed of a beauty and grace quite unique of their kind. Tall and slight, with a slightly drooping figure, the movements of undulating grace. A small head, a swan-like throat, and a complexion like a pearl. Large dark eyes, not soft or sleepy, but with a look of quiet command in them. A low sweet voice with very distinct utterance emphasised the effect [and enhanced the charm] of her engrossing personality. Her children idolised her.


This delicate frame evidently harboured very strong convictions and emotions which during these early years however were still seeking an outlet and adequate means of expression. It is probable that from an early stage her character and outlook had been shaped by a violent revolt against the social conventions which not only, at the time of life when she did not comprehend what it meant, had placed her in permanent dependence on a man whom she regarded as her inferior in intellect and general culture, but which also excluded her from almost all those activities for which she regarded herself fit. There is almost certainly an autobiographical element in a passage of one of her early literary efforts in which she complains that 'in the present system of habits and opinions, girls enter into what is called a contract perfectly ignorant of the conditions of it, and that they should be so is considered absolutely essential to their fitness for it!' But if the conditions of women, their education and their position in marriage were at the time Mrs. Taylor's main concern and probably the starting point of her other reflections, they were by no means the limit of her rationalist revolt against the tyranny of public opinion.

What we know about her views and interests during these early years must be derived from a sheaf of notes and drafts which seem to belong mostly to the time just before or soon after she met Mill, but none of which can be dated with any certainty. There is no clear evidence that she attempted any prose composition before she met Mill or before, soon afterwards, she began to contribute to Fox's Monthly Repository. But the variety of drafts and scraps on the position of women, on education and various social usages and conventions, which date from about the same period, suggest that these problems must have been occupying her for some time. The most interesting of these essays, which in parts curiously anticipates some of the arguments of On Liberty, is reprinted as Appendix II to the present volume.

Mrs. Taylor had however tried her hand at poetry for some time before 1830. The six poems of hers that have been preserved, three of them printed in the Monthly Repository, are of unequal quality. They suggest the inspiration of Shelley and the best show some real poetic gift, though in execution they are probably not much superior to the production of many young women of her time. Two of her published and one of her unpublished poems are also printed in Appendix I.

The only members of Mrs. Taylor's circle of whom we can form a distinct picture, and probably the only ones who mattered in connexion with Mill, were William Johnson Fox and the two remarkable young women with whom he had become closely associated only a short time before: Eliza and Sarah Flower. In 1830 Fox was a man of forty-four and at the height of his fame as a Unitarian preacher but, as editor of the Monthly Repository since 1827, already at the beginning of a transition to an even more influential position as a radical journalist and politician. He had risen from a small farmer's son, and later a weaver's boy and bank clerk in Norwich, to be a considerable public figure mainly through that eloquence which in later years made him famous as one of the most powerful orators of the Anti-Corn-Law League. At the time he was however still one of the leading figures of the Unitarian Association, but this connexion soon became looser, and in later years, though he continued to preach at South Place Chapel, it was more as a precursor of the Ethical Movement of his successor Moncure Conway than as the representative of any Christian denomination. The alienation from the more strict body of Unitarians was partly the result of his connexion with Eliza Flower.

Fox was unhappily married and had been brought in close contact with the two beautiful and highly gifted sisters when on the death of their father in 1829 he had become their trustee. Aged twenty-seven and twenty-five respectively in 1830, and thus only slightly older than Mill and Harriet Taylor, Eliza and Sarah Flower must have been fascinating persons. Eliza was a composer of some distinction and Sarah wrote poetry of merit and is to-day remembered as the author of the hymn 'Nearer, my God, to Thee'. After the early death of their mother they had been educated solely by their father and had developed their natural gifts without systematic training or much discipline of any sort. There can be little doubt that it was Eliza Flower to whom Mill refers in the Autobiography when he speaks of Mrs. Taylor's 'life [...] of inward meditation, varied by familiar intercourse with a small circle of friends, of whom one only (long since deceased) was a person of genius, or of capacities of feeling or intellect kindred with her own'. A series of informal notes by Eliza Flower to Mrs. Taylor which have survived show that for some years in the early 'thirties the two women were fairly intimate and that the fragile and somewhat unstable Eliza Flower was rather looking up to the younger but more self-possessed and more happily circumstanced married woman. Known as 'Ariel' in her intimate circle, Eliza Flower seems indeed to have had in her something of that ethereal spirit. Fox's biographer describes her as

Emphatically a child of nature, open and transparent as the day. She worshipped Mozart, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Byron, but if these had never existed, Eliza Flower would still have been Eliza Flower. While this independence and spontaneity gave an indescribable charm to her character, they were not wholly favourable to her in the world of Art. Music came so naturally to her that she never realised the importance of strenuous study, and such a professional training as, indeed, it would probably have been beyond her means to procure.


Eliza Flower became Fox's closest friend, devoting all her energies to assist him in his literary work, and after his separation from his wife in 1835 came to superintend his household, inevitably causing scandalous talk which for a time made Fox's position in the congregation difficult. This may also have been one of the reasons which made it appear inadvisable for Mrs. Taylor to maintain the connexion when her own position came under similar criticism, although Eliza Flower's increasing eccentricity probably also made the two women gradually drift apart.

In her way the younger sister, Sarah Flower, seems to have been no less remarkable a person and by her marriage in 1834 to William Bridges Adams brought another strong personality into the closer circle of friends in which Mrs. Taylor and Mill moved. W. B. Adams, who had been married before to a daughter of Francis Place, was then mainly active as a radical writer and for several years was one of the most frequent contributors to the Monthly Repository. He later became a successful carriage manufacturer and eminent railway engineer. For some time he seems to have been on cordial terms with Mill, who took great trouble to draw attention to a book, The Producing Man's Companion, which Adams had published under the pseudonym of 'Junius Redivivus'.

Around this inner group there gathered in the early eighteen-thirties a number of minor literary and artistic figures, mostly contributors to the Monthly Repository and including a considerable number of women. For some time Harriet Martineau, then at the very beginning of her literary career, was among Fox's most regular contributors. Two other gifted sisters, Margaret Gillies, the miniature painter, and Mary Gillies, the novelist, also appear to have belonged to the somewhat unconventional and strongly feminist group of whose members Leigh Hunt has drawn a picture in his Bluestocking Revels.

The Monthly Repository itself during Fox's editorship, especially after he had purchased it in 1831 and largely divorced it from its predominantly Unitarian character, was an organ of very considerable distinction and influence both in its political and literary department. Some of the articles, especially Crabbe Robinson's series on Goethe, are landmarks of the literary history of the period. But the feature which distinguished it from the other radical periodicals of the time and which, while it alienated its Unitarian supporters, must have made it particularly congenial to Harriet Taylor, was its strong feminist bias. Both W. J. Fox, whose views on divorce show a Miltonian strain, and W. B. Adams wrote in it extensively on the subject, and their arguments often so closely resemble some of Mrs. Taylor's manuscript drafts of the period that one wonders whether it was merely that she imbibed her ideas from them or whether her somewhat unpolished drafts did not perhaps serve as the basis for the articles of the more skilled writers.

It is probable that John Stuart Mill was in close contact with Fox's circle for some time before he met Mrs. Taylor. It has even been said that he was supposed at one time an aspirant for Eliza Flower's hand. There existed many connexions between the group of the Utilitarians and Fox's Unitarian congregation, which included such immediate disciples of Jeremy Bentham as Dr. John Bowring and Dr. Southwood Smith; Fox himself in 1826 had contributed to the first number of the Westminster Review.

The impressions we derive from the Autobiography are rather misleading when we try to form a picture of John Stuart Mill at the age of twenty-four when he was introduced to Mrs. Taylor. That work conveys to us mainly, on the one hand, an image of the object of that extraordinary educational experiment which is its main theme, and on the other, of the author when he wrote it in late middle age. But the Mill of the intermediate period who concerns us here was in many ways a very different person from either. He was no longer simply the creation of his father, the perfectly constructed intellectual instrument zealously serving the cause for which his father had designed him. That period had ended with the 'crisis in his mental development' which occurred in his twentieth year. Nor was he yet the austere, secluded and severe philosopher he became soon after the age of thirty. Even in appearance we must imagine him very different from the familiar picture which we derive mainly from Watt's portrait painted in the last year of his life or from the photographs of not much earlier date. Long before then ill health, overwork and constant nervous strain had prematurely made him look old. No early portrait of Mill as a young man exists and we must try to reconstruct his appearance from the few descriptions by contemporaries.

Carlyle, first meeting him in 1831, described him as 'a slender, rather tall and elegant youth, with small clear Roman-nosed face, two small earnestly smiling eyes; modest, remarkably gifted with precision of utterance, enthusiastic, yet lucid, calm; not a great, yet distinctly a gifted and amiable youth'. Much later he remembered him as 'an innocent young creature, with rich auburn hair and gentle pathetic expression, beautiful to contemplate'. The earliest portrait which has been preserved, the medallion reproduced here, is also of a later date. It would appear to represent him in his late thirties and is probably identical with the portrait done by a certain Cunningham in Falmouth in 1840 which Caroline Fox describes as 'quite an ideal head, so expanded with patient thought, and a face of such exquisite refinement'. But by then Mill had already passed through his first bout of severe illness, lost most of his hair and acquired that nervous twitch over his eyes which he retained during the remainder of his life. If, however, after his thirtieth year Mill was permanently handicapped by ill health, and though he may even never have fully recovered from the nervous breakdown of ten years before, he appears to have been naturally endowed with a splendid constitution, which enabled him not only to overcome these handicaps but to continue to perform an amount of work and to remain even during acute illness capable of an amount of physical exertion which sometimes seem scarcely credible.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Hayek on Mill by F. A. Hayek, Sandra J. Peart. Copyright © 2015 The Estate of F. A. Hayek. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Editorial Foreword
Editor’s Acknowledgements
Editor’s Introduction

HAYEK ON MILL: THE MILL-TAYLOR FRIENDSHIP AND RELATED WRITINGS

Part I. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Friendship and Subsequent Marriage

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and Symbols Used

Introduction

One                 Harriet Taylor and Her Circle (1830)
Two                 Acquaintance and Early Crises (1830–1833)
Three               On Marriage and Divorce (about 1832)
Four                 Friends and Gossip (1834–1842)
Five                 The Years of Friendship (1834–1847)
Six                   A Joint Production (1847–1849)
Seven              John Taylor’s Illness and Death (1849)
Eight               Marriage and Break with Mill’s Family (1851)
Nine                Illness (1851–1854)
Ten                  Italy and Sicily (1854–1855)
Eleven             Greece (1855)
Twelve            Last Years and Death of Mrs. Mill (1856–1858)
Appendix I      Poems by Harriet Taylor
Appendix II    An Early Essay by Harriet Taylor
Appendix III   Family Trees

Part II. Related Writings

Thirteen           John Stuart Mill at the Age of Twenty-Five
Fourteen          J. S. Mill’s Correspondence
Fifteen             The Dispersal of the Books and Papers of John Stuart Mill
Sixteen            J. S. Mill, Mrs. Taylor, and Socialism
Seventeen        Portraits of J. S. Mill
Eighteen          Preface to The Life of John Stuart Mill
Nineteen          Review of Mill and His Early Critics
Twenty            Review of John Mill’s Boyhood Visit to France
Twenty-One    Introduction to Considerations on Representative Government
Twenty-Two   Introduction to The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1812–1848
Twenty-Three  Related Correspondence
Index of Names
Index of Subjects

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